Not Doing SAFe®? No Problem. Not Doing These? Big Problem

There is a lot of negative press about SAFe it seems. They talk about how it is overkill, but it seems no one recognizes that it suggests a variety of practices that have proven to be essential. So, if you don’t want to do SAFe, that’s fine, but if you don’t do all of these things, then you are likely going to have troubles. Here are what we’ve seen to be essential practices at scale:

Use a foundation of Lean-Thinking (leadership, respect, flow, kaizen, value)

Manage flow throughout the value stream, by attending to shared backlogs, team structure and WIP

Create teams to the extent possible and advisable

Use test-first methods

Have architecture epics be a peer with business epics

Have an owner for the development value stream

Attend to delays

Push decision making to local levels where advisable

Align on cadence and synchronize regularly

Achieve continuous integration

In my experience, missing anyone of these can be very detrimental and risky. While I like Scrum at the team level, Kanban at the implementation level, and the Kanban Method in circumstances where Kaizen is your only option, not one of these addresses all of these essential concepts.

To learn more, please contact me. We are gold partners with SAFe, but it is not our only approach – so we are not selling the one-solution we have (we have a lot of options). We actually don’t sell at all. We help you discover what you need and the help you achieve that – if we can’t, we’ll recommend someone who can.